Jimmy Breslin was an archetype, a white ethnic working-class New York journalist who spoke his mind, stuck his thumb in the eye of authority municipal, financial, and criminal, and found his story in the people of his city.
Except that archetypes are supposed to be eternal. It’s not just that cities change fast and New York City changes faster than most, or that white ethnics in America’s big cities have long been carrot-and-sticked out to the suburbs by comfort and crime. It’s that they don’t make journalists like Breslin these days. If by journalism we mean the job as Breslin knew it, they barely make journalism at all.
Breslin (1928-2017) is remembered as a columnist, especially for the New York Daily News. But he wrote for everyone else, as well as writing crime fiction and biographies of Damon Runyon, Rudy Giuliani, and the 1962 New York Mets. In 1947, the Daily News moved 2.4 million print copies a day and was the model for Clark Kent’s Daily Planet. That was some time ago. The last great American tabloid is the Daily News’s rival, the New York Post. Its past editors include Breslin’s peer in big-city muckraking and deadline artistry, Pete Hamill (1935-2020), also a columnist and novelist.
They say journalism is the first draft of history, but no writer keeps his first drafts. Unless, that is, he’s stockpiling them for the chance to sell them to a college archive. In our age of mass media, history is the second draft of journalism. Most journalism is now online. The Pew Research Center reported in May that a quarter of the online content published between 2013 and 2023 is already no longer available. If you print it, it will last.
The Library of America prints to last. It takes journalism more seriously than most journalists do these days. The LOA publishes superb collections of reportage from the World Wars, Vietnam, and the civil rights campaigns. It also publishes the selected A.J. Liebling, edited by Pete Hamill; someone should edit a Hamill collection. Best of all is the complete “Prejudices” of H.L. Mencken. These will teach prospective journalists far more than a master’s degree from the Columbia School of Journalism, and for only $75 rather than $119,659.
The Breslin collection is edited by Dan Barry, a longtime columnist for the New York Times. You get 73 columns and long-form pieces, half of which haven’t been previously republished, and also two book-length essays. Every piece is excellent, but it’s not natural to read journalism collections cover to cover: the sympathetic way to do it is one piece a day, like the real thing. Breslin wrote as a social historian in the style that came to be called New Journalism in the ’60s: adopting the novelist’s methods of characterization and narrative, with the journalistic narrator as a subjective participant. This gets too rich for the digestion in large servings.
The New Journalism is old hat now. It was hard to do well (Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese) and easy to do badly (Hunter S. Thompson). Instead of striking at a telling nugget of truth — Breslin, attending President Kennedy’s funeral, tracked down the man who had dug the president’s grave — its techniques have become formulaic distractions, a washing of authorial hands as they steer you to a predetermined conclusion.
What’s striking now when you read the old New Journalism is how soaked its practitioners were in literary technique: the tricks of the trade that engage the reader by piquing interest and preserving uncertainty. This is why Tom Wolfe has more in common with Mark Twain than with Tom Friedman. The management of social detail in Gay Talese’s “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” is how Balzac would have done it, had he gone to Vegas.
New Journalism aside, Jimmy Breslin was a master of the traditional basics that the hacks call the “lede” (the opener) and the “kicker” (the closer). No sane person would stop reading after this lede: “Her name is Joan and her nationality is thief.” Or this: “Cassius Clay landed a left jab and moved to his right and then nothing much was happening,” which opens Breslin’s report from Miami Beach on the Ali-Liston heavyweight title bout of 1964.
These are in the laconic line of Hemingway and Steinbeck, but Breslin specialized in the extended opener in the mood of Damon Runyon:
“As this was the first subway ride in days in which someone’s elbow was not in my mouth, I was able to talk to the person alongside me on the train from Queens yesterday morning.”
Or Ring Lardner: “As it was with the mother who went before her, the last breath for the daughter was made before an onlooker with frightened eyes.” Six lines before the end, we are told that the dying daughter’s name is Rosemary Breslin. The onlooker is Jimmy Breslin. By then, we are inside the onlooker’s memory of the time when both his wife and daughter were alive. The kicker is “The mother took her hand, and walked her away, as if to the first day of school.”
Breslin sometimes extended his openers into multiclausal scene-setters from a short story: “When he was in high school, his family moved down from Philadelphia onto a farm a mile outside of this town in southern Georgia, right there by the Alabama line, a town with the old Southern Railway tracks still running through the middle, with the town square and its pre-Civil War courthouse and all the decent folks on the east side of the tracks, the blacks and the white trash on the other.”
The conversational phrasing (“this town in southern Georgia,” “all the decent folks”) anticipates the speech of Breslin’s subject, a gay man dying of AIDS. It’s a stylistic tightrope walk, and easy to fall into sentimentality. Breslin sometimes does. Sentimentality was in character, the shadow side of the hard-bitten, hard-drinking newsman. Sentimentality is the shorthand of compassion, and compassion was still a virtue among journalists. When Norman Mailer ran for mayor of New York City, Breslin ran for the presidency of the City Council. This, too, was sentimentality. But what is the point of life, especially in New York City, if you cannot try to be larger than it?
Breslin’s father was an absentee drunk and piano player, Hamill’s a one-legged clerk and factory worker. Hamill left school at 15, then took some night classes. Breslin attended college but did not graduate. The profession had yet to professionalize its workers by graduate degrees and credentials. Journalists learned the job because they were amateurs in the true sense that word derives from the Latin (amo, amas, amat): they loved it. The big-city journalists wrote about the world that had shaped them, using the common language they shared with their subjects.
Today’s journalists write in the same ways, and that is the problem. Their world is the Ivy League and the aristo-technocracy of the Acela class. Their language is a managerial conspiracy against the laity. The politician and the bureaucrat manage society on the people’s behalf. The journalist volunteers to manage the people’s perceptions on the politician’s behalf. The people who talk about speaking truth to power are speaking lies on their own behalf. There is no news, only press releases.
Breslin would have slaughtered these soft-handed, snobbish servants of unearned authority — not least for their sloppy writing. Breslin’s long-form pieces unfurl with the same rigor as his short columns. The Short Sweet Dream of Eduardo Gutierrez (2002) reads like Truman Capote with a heart. Breslin’s investigation of the death of an illegal immigrant from Mexico on a building site in Williamsburg traces every skein of the causality of an ignored tragedy, from coyotes at the border to corrupt building permits.
Nineteenth-century journalism produced essayists such as Carlyle, Emerson, Dickens, Twain, Wilde, and W.T. Stead. Twentieth-century journalism produced eyewitness reporters and 800-word columnists, then talking heads on TV. Twenty-first-century journalism boiled it down to the 240-character tweet and the iPhone clip. But the same cheap digital technology is now diluting the format back to 19th-century scale via the endless scroll of Substack. The long essay is back, but you cannot ask an unfit man to run a marathon.
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It is cheaper now to write at length in your own voice than it has ever been. All it takes is daring, talent, hard work, and a willingness to go it alone. The kicker is:
These are the rarest qualities in the world.
Dominic Green is a Washington Examiner columnist and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Find him on X @drdominicgreen.
